Simple Floating Voltage-Controlled Memductor Emulator for Analog Applications

The topic of memristive circuits is a novel topic in circuit theory that has become of great importance due to its unique behavior which is useful in different applications. But since there is a lack of memristor samples, a memristor emulator is used instead of a solid state memristor. In this paper, a new simple floating voltage-controlled memductor emulator is introduced which is implemented using commercial off the shelf (COTS) realization. The mathematical modeling of the proposed circuit is derived to match the theoretical model. The proposed circuit is tested experimentally using different excitation signals such as sinusoidal, square, and triangular waves showing an excellent matching with previously reported simulations

A Compact CMOS Memristor Emulator Circuit and its Applications

Conceptual memristors have recently gathered wider interest due to their diverse application in non-von Neumann computing, machine learning, neuromorphic computing, and chaotic circuits. We introduce a compact CMOS circuit that emulates idealized memristor characteristics and can bridge the gap between concepts to chip-scale realization by transcending device challenges. The CMOS memristor circuit embodies a two-terminal variable resistor whose resistance is controlled by the voltage applied across its terminals. The memristor 'state' is held in a capacitor that controls the resistor value. This work presents the design and simulation of the memristor emulation circuit, and applies it to a memcomputing application of maze solving using analog parallelism. Furthermore, the memristor emulator circuit can be designed and fabricated using standard commercial CMOS technologies and opens doors to interesting applications in neuromorphic and machine learning circuits.Comment: Submitted to International Symposium of Circuits and Systems (ISCAS) 201

Teaching Memory Circuit Elements via Experiment-Based Learning

The class of memory circuit elements which comprises memristive, memcapacitive, and meminductive systems, is gaining considerable attention in a broad range of disciplines. This is due to the enormous flexibility these elements provide in solving diverse problems in analog/neuromorphic and digital/quantum computation; the possibility to use them in an integrated computing-memory paradigm, massively-parallel solution of different optimization problems, learning, neural networks, etc. The time is therefore ripe to introduce these elements to the next generation of physicists and engineers with appropriate teaching tools that can be easily implemented in undergraduate teaching laboratories. In this paper, we suggest the use of easy-to-build emulators to provide a hands-on experience for the students to learn the fundamental properties and realize several applications of these memelements. We provide explicit examples of problems that could be tackled with these emulators that range in difficulty from the demonstration of the basic properties of memristive, memcapacitive, and meminductive systems to logic/computation and cross-bar memory. The emulators can be built from off-the-shelf components, with a total cost of a few tens of dollars, thus providing a relatively inexpensive platform for the implementation of these exercises in the classroom. We anticipate that this experiment-based learning can be easily adopted and expanded by the instructors with many more case studies.Comment: IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine (in press

Experimental study of artificial neural networks using a digital memristor simulator

© 2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.This paper presents a fully digital implementation of a memristor hardware simulator, as the core of an emulator, based on a behavioral model of voltage-controlled threshold-type bipolar memristors. Compared to other analog solutions, the proposed digital design is compact, easily reconfigurable, demonstrates very good matching with the mathematical model on which it is based, and complies with all the required features for memristor emulators. We validated its functionality using Altera Quartus II and ModelSim tools targeting low-cost yet powerful field programmable gate array (FPGA) families. We tested its suitability for complex memristive circuits as well as its synapse functioning in artificial neural networks (ANNs), implementing examples of associative memory and unsupervised learning of spatio-temporal correlations in parallel input streams using a simplified STDP. We provide the full circuit schematics of all our digital circuit designs and comment on the required hardware resources and their scaling trends, thus presenting a design framework for applications based on our hardware simulator.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Memcapacitor and Meminductor Circuit Emulators: A Review

This research was funded by the Japanese KAKENHI through Grant Number JP18k04275 and Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture, and Sport (MECD), through Project TEC2017-89955-P and Grant Numbers: FPU16/01451 and FPU16/04043.In 1971, Prof. L. Chua theoretically introduced a new circuit element, which exhibited a different behavior from that displayed by any of the three known passive elements: the resistor, the capacitor or the inductor. This element was called memristor, since its behavior corresponded to a resistor with memory. Four decades later, the concept of mem-elements was extended to the other two circuit elements by the definition of the constitutive equations of both memcapacitors and meminductors. Since then, the non-linear and non-volatile properties of these devices have attracted the interest of many researches trying to develop a wide range of applications. However, the lack of solid-state implementations of memcapacitors and meminductors make it necessary to rely on circuit emulators for the use and investigation of these elements in practical implementations. On this basis, this review gathers the current main alternatives presented in the literature for the emulation of both memcapacitors and meminductors. Different circuit emulators have been thoroughly analyzed and compared in detail, providing a wide range of approaches that could be considered for the implementation of these devices in future designs.Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan (MEXT) Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (KAKENHI) JP18k04275Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture, and Sport (MECD) TEC2017-89955-P FPU16/01451 FPU16/0404

Fully CMOS Memristor Based Chaotic Circuit

This paper demonstrates the design of a fully CMOS chaotic circuit consisting of only DDCC based memristor and inductance simulator. Our design is composed of these active blocks using CMOS 0.18 µm process technology with symmetric ±1.25 V supply voltages. A new single DDCC+ based topology is used as the inductance simulator. Simulation results verify that the design proposed satisfies both memristor properties and the chaotic behavior of the circuit. Simulations performed illustrate the success of the proposed design for the realization of CMOS based chaotic applications